Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
